Sony Upgrades PS5 Pro's PSSR Upscaler In Time For Resident Evil Requiem
As triple-A gaming trends more and more toward graphically-intensive titles with ray tracing enabled, vendors are in a continuous march to improve upscaling solutions to offset skyrocketing performance demands. PlayStation is no exception, as it has now finally shipped an updated PSSR upscaler with the release of Resident Evil: Requiem, aka Resident Evil 9.
According to a new PlayStation blog post, Sony's updated PSSR upscaler came about as a result of its Project Amethyst collaboration with AMD, which also contributed to FSR 4. As Sony states, "through AMD's FSR 4 upscaling technology, PC gamers have already seen the benefits of our collaboration. With the updated PSSR, we're delivering the very latest of this co-developed technology with a further six months of refinement for PS5 Pro players."
PSSR is a feature exclusive to PlayStation 5 Pro, which is broadly comparable to AMD's also-AI-accelerated FSR 4 and currently present in over 50 PS5 Pro-enhanced games. Requiem is the first title to offer the feature, though, and by all accounts is using it quite well. A statement from Resident Evil developer Capcom states, "The upgraded PSSR has allowed us to elevate our expressiveness by successfully processing these (hair) details and textural particularities, which are traditionally difficult to upscale because of their intricacy."
Old PSSR (Bottom) vs. New PSSR (Top), Click To Enlarge For Full-Screen Comparison
Above, we've included the official old PSSR versus the new PSSR in comparison shots provided by Sony, and the handling of fine hair detail is indeed impressive with the updated upscaling solution. Even viewed at a lower resolution, the difference in detail is readily-apparent.
The good news doesn't stop there, either: coming in March, a wave of PS5 Pro games will be receiving the new PSSR upscaler as well. This should further improve the gaming experience at 1440p and 4K resolutions on PlayStation 5 Pro and help make the improvements from PS5 just a little clearer and sharper.
Digital Foundry also uploaded a new PSSR comparison, including against FSR 4 and DLSS 4.5 on PC
Even outside of Sony's official blog post, third-party comparisons between PSSR, AMD FSR 4 and NVIDIA DLSS 4.5 are showing great strides on the part of PSSR upscaling. While NVIDIA's DLSS will likely lead the pack for quite some time, AI upscaling has become a mature technology only hampered by some motion handling and artifacting issues that come with upscaling from a lower internal resolution.
As an added boon for PlayStation 5 Pro players, you won't need to rely on the publisher actually updating your game to enjoy the benefits of the new PSSR, either—as long as your game supports base PSSR, a March system update will allow you to force the new version through a manual system setting, similar to how FSR 4 can be forced over PC games that only support FSR 3.1.
